After the search and rescue crew couldn’t find her and the dozens of signs posted across town couldn’t find her, after the viral Facebook campaign, the tracking team of German shepherds, the aerial drone and the two psychics all couldn’t find her, Seth Sachson finally began to worry this week that a lost-dog search as only Aspen could do it wouldn’t end happily.
It had been 10 days since Cleo, a husky mix, had wandered off from a multimillion-dollar estate outside the swanky town. And, if Sachson was being honest, Cleo wasn’t fit to survive on her own. She is elderly. She walks with a limp.
In her younger years, she had been a hardy sled dog, raised outdoors. But after retirement and four and a half years at Sachson’s animal shelter, she had been adopted and taken to live in a home with six bedrooms. A few days later, her new owner turned away for a moment, and Cleo disappeared.
And, now, at 13 years old, Cleo was out there somewhere in the vast Rocky Mountain wilderness. The efforts of seemingly everyone in Aspen couldn’t figure out where.
“We were all concerned that she was dead,” said Sachson, director of the “You know that she’d been eaten by a coyote or fell in a ditch. Our minds immediately went to the worst-case scenario.”
Cleo had known hardship before. Her time at a sled dog tour company in Snowmass called Krabloonik coincided with The local from the facility. There were were underfed or chained outside in extreme cold.
When Sachson first met Cleo, she was too old to pull anymore and no use to her owner. Sachson took her back to the shelter, where she lived with a promise of never being put down but without a guarantee of ever finding a permanent home.
The years raced by.
But, as they did, something curious happened. Cleo, this discarded dog, became a beloved fixture at the shelter. Volunteers took her for regular walks, and people stopped by to visit her. One couple brought her treats of rotisserie chicken.
At last this May, a Pitkin County resident named Liba Icahn — a former ballerina once married to one of the richest men in the world — adopted Cleo. And, then, only five days later, Cleo was gone.
Icahn called Sachson, and the two, along with volunteers and shelter employees, launched a frenzied search that lasted for hours every day.
Growing desperate, Icahn offered a $1,500 reward, which a local couple soon added an additional $1,000 to. They hired a drone operator to fly over the sage and the woods. Sachson, even though he was skeptical, consulted a psychic. Then another.
“When you’re missing a dog, you’re open to any options to find that dog,” he said.
But, in the end, the break in the case arrived in the most Aspen of ways.
It came via kayak.
Boaters began calling Sachson with tips of a dog along the river bank. On Wednesday, one told Sachson that she was sure the dog was Cleo.
“I gave her part of my peanut butter PowerBar,” kayaker Denise Handrich told The Aspen Times,
A few hours later, Cleo was in Sachson’s arms as he helped her up a slope away from the river and into familiar terrain. She had been missing for 10 days, but, when she was found, she was less than a quarter mile from the shelter.
And that, at least for awhile, is where she will stay, back at the home that the adoption dog adopted for her own and where, in the haunt of moguls and movie stars, she now outshines them all.
“Because she is this amazing success story of survival, she is getting more attention than even the puppies,” Sachson said. “Everybody who walks through the door is coming to see her.”
